Great concept, good design, decent execution - until the story lets it down. Oxenfree is a game that relies heavily on the novelty of its structure, and the structure does carry a lot. Dialogue choices are made in real time, and if you don't act quickly, your silence also influences the game's multiple endings. Innovative, right?
What lets this game down is its lack of follow-through. What begins as a really cool, freaky concept (there's some stuff in that cave and it sure is strange) turns into a multi-layered scavenger hunt that's just resolved too quickly and too conventionally for my taste. I wanted those rifts to give me something really different, and 2/3 of the way in it was evident the novelty was in the dialogue choices and pacing, not the storytelling itself. There are some endings that needed more in-game narrative time to justify the reward, or the cost.
I disagree with a lot of folks on the authenticity of some of the characters. Ren in particular is incredibly annoying, and his "druggie" persona doesn't mesh with a lot of his hyperactive dialogue. His persona threw me out of the narrative a few times from the get-go. I ended up with a not-so-great ending for him, and considering he's Alex's best friend, that I didn't care and skipped through what he had to say about it was a real shame. It takes too long to unravel what Clarissa's attitude problem is about, and there's not enough time devoted to the emotional implications of that to make the choice regarding her character worth much to me.
The game alternates between trying to be "quiet" and trying to jam too many time jumps into its convoluted storyline for the novelty of the mechanism. It's charming, however, and sucked me in for a good while.
There's nothing "wrong" with this game, but it needed a little more depth and a lot more weird. At its worst, it's annoying to have to backtrack your way through areas you've explored before at the speed the game lets you progress. It's definitely worth playing and it pushes the boundaries of what you can do in the medium, which is always worth a lot to me. I picked this up in the PSN flash sale so I also can't complain about the price point. Give it a go.